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Passion for planning sparked by childhood experience
By Molly Parker
Staff Writer
Bill Gore will never forget his return to North Charleston. It was Valentine’s Day, 1983.
“I fell in love with the city,” he said with a chuckle.
After graduating from college and working for several years in Alabama, Gore found a job back in his home state as a staff planner for the city.
Today, Gore is the director of North Charleston’s Department of Planning and Management. As such, he’s the soft-spoken public figure behind a department that is the crossroads between City Council and development.
Gore’s office is charged with monitoring growth and development within the city limits, which includes presiding over business license, plat and site plan reviews, and policing zoning ordinances. Most residential and commercial developments are first vetted here.
From the outside looking in, it’s as if Gore and his staff are master puzzlers, piecing together some 70 square miles of land with challenges ranging from suburban sprawl to urban blight.
“The challenges in some parts of the city are very different than they are in others. In the outlying areas, our focus has been on trying to make sure basic municipal services and infrastructure keeps pace with growth,” Gore said.
“In the more central and southern areas of the city, we’ve been trying to stabilize the population and reverse some of the negative impacts of out-migration and blight.”
Gore moved to North Charleston from Anniston, Ala., where he was a transportation planner for the East Alabama Regional and Planning Development Commission—that state’s version of a Berkeley-Charleston-Dorchester Council of Governments.
But Gore lasted just a couple of years as a staff planner in North Charleston. He and his wife, Pamela, were tenants at Amberwood Apartments, which still exists on Lambs Road, and a rash of burglaries one month made him hesitate to leave his wife at home during the day.
North Charleston requires city employees to live within its boundaries, and when he was offered a job with the Council of Governments, Gore accepted.
“It was just one of those situations where I thought it was time to pursue my interest in transportation planning,” he said, and then paused. “We moved to West Ashley and promptly got burglarized.”
Fate would pull him back to North Charleston City Hall. He’d spent seven years with the Council of Governments when John Cawley, his former boss in the planning department, now the mayor’s special assistant for economic development, suggested he apply for work as a projects manager in the city’s newly created Department of Revitalization and Economic Development.
That was in 1991, and Gore said recently he hopes North Charleston carries him into retirement in a few short years. Gore challenged anyone who labels North Charleston as a bad place to live to take a drive around and reassess.
“It’s a big city and it has some emerging big-city problems, which we are working very hard to try to control and manage,” Gore said. “But over 85,000 people have chosen to call this home. If people actually stop and think about it and look for themselves, and take time to get to know North Charleston, they would find there are lots and lots of things that are good and desirable and pleasant about North Charleston.”
In his career in North Charleston, Gore has served under each of the four mayors who have led the city since it was incorporated in 1972.
“And I consider all of them to be friends,” he said of former mayors John Bourne, Bob Kinard and Ken McClure, and current Mayor Keith Summey.
He counts among his accomplishments ongoing efforts to create a regional transportation grid and to revitalize the older portions of the city by encouraging home ownership and strict code enforcement. He noted that 10,000 new units are planned inside the Mark Clark Expressway, which he called “a tremendous change in the pattern of out-migration.”
The bulk of those new units will go up at the old Charleston Naval Base as part of the Noisette Co.’s planned development, called the Navy Yard at Noisette.
That mixed-use project was crafted by private developers, Gore said, following a reworking of the city’s Planned Development Districts to give developers more freedom and flexibility in project design while preserving control by the council.
Finding solutions to complicated problems is what makes Gore look forward to work on most days. And he may soon face a new challenge.
The city plans to separate the zoning aspect of his job into a separate department, which Gore will head. North Charleston is looking for a replacement planning and management director, he said.
His love for city planning and architecture must have been inspired by childhood experiences that brought him and his brother to New York City, he said. Gore’s father, a lawyer and professor, took classes for two summers in the city in the mid-’60s. During one stay, he and his older brother got to check out the 1964 New York World’s Fair exhibit.
“They had models of futuristic cities, and I think it must have had some sort of effect on me because thereafter, my little artwork would include these little cities. By the time I got to college, I ended up going into the urban studies program.”
The other major memory Gore has of childhood is listening to his father’s old World War II stories.
“He worked on maintaining communication lines along the Ledo Road that was being built from India to China. So it wasn’t surprising I had an interest in transportation planning when I became a young adult,” he said. “When I got to Georgia Tech, I got a master’s in city planning with a concentration in transportation. I sometimes wonder if that wasn’t partly somehow a result of hearing those stories all those years.”
Molly Parker is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail her directly at mparker@setcommedia.com.
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